9/2/2017 Control Tutorials for MATLAB and Simulink - Extras: MATLAB Tips & Tricks

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INTRODUCTION CRUISE CONTROL MOTOR SPEED

SYSTEM

MODELING Extras: MATLAB Tips & Tricks

ANALYSIS
Matlab and Simulink are remarkably powerful tools, and once you're familiar

with them, most tasks are for the most part straightforward and intuitive.
CONTROL
Recent versions of the software provide many usesful toolboxes and GUI

PID interfaces to simplify your work. However, there are still a few things that

can be tricky to accomplish. This page provides a list of helpful tips and
ROOT LOCUS
tricks that should come in handly as you work through these control tutorials
FREQUENCY and elsewhere.

STATE-SPACE

Contents
DIGITAL

Changing the Frequency Units on the Bode Plots

Getting Magnitude and Phase Data for a System

SIMULINK

Changing Font Size and Line Width in Figures

MODELING

CONTROL
Changing the Frequency Units on the Bode Plots

To change between Hertz (Hz) and radians per second (rad/s) on the bode
plot, use the following commands:

s = tf('s');

G = 1/(s+1);

options = bodeoptions;

options.FreqUnits = 'Hz'; % or 'rad/second', 'rpm', etc.

figure(1)

bode(G,options);

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Please refer to the Matlab help page on bodeoptions for more details and

optional parameters.

Getting Magnitude and Phase Data for a System

The Bode plot of a system, , shows the magnitude, (in dB), and

phase (degrees) over a range of fregencies. Often it is neccesary

to access this frequency response data directly, which is accomplished

easily using the following commands:

win = logspace(-2,2,5)

[mag,phase,wout] = bode(G,win);

size(wout)

size(mag)

size(phase)

win =

0.0100 0.1000 1.0000 10.0000 100.0000

ans =

5 1

ans =

1 1 5

ans =

1 1 5

where win is the input frequency vector in rad/s, mag is the magnitude in

absolute units (i.e. not in dB), phase is the phase in degrees, and wout is

the output frequencies at which the response was evaulated, useful for

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instance if you let MATLAB automatically choose the frequency vector by

specifying only the range, win = {wmin, wmax}.

You'll notice that though wout is a standard (n x 1) column vector, the

magnitude and phase are actually (1 x 1 x n). This is because the bode

command accepts transfer function matrices in which case the (i,j,k)

element of magnitude and phase corresponds to the jth input and ith output.

For the SISO systems we most often encounter, i = j =1, these singleton

dimensions are an inconvenience for matrix operatione, etc. Fortunately

MATLAB offers the function, squeeze, to fix just this problem:

mag = squeeze(mag)

phase = squeeze(phase)

mag =

1.0000

0.9950

0.7071

0.0995

0.0100

phase =

-0.5729

-5.7106

-45.0000

-84.2894

-89.4271

Changing Font Size and Line Width in Figures

MATLAB is a wonderful tool for visualizing data and generating figures for

papers and presentations; however, the default appearance of these figures

is not always sufficient for your needs. Fortunately, MATLAB allows you to

change nearly every property of the figure to your liking. Here we

demonstrate two possible changes that are commonly required.

To change the font size of all text in a figure (titles, axis labels, legends,
etc.) we need to search for all axes and text objects using findall and

change their properties using set. This is the easiest way since figures may
containt multiple axes, e.g. bode, each with their own font size properties

and furthermore MATLAB handles titles and axes labels separately from tick
marks. Changing line width is treated in a similar fashion, and other

properties (e.g. color) can be changed at the same time as shown:

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9/2/2017 Control Tutorials for MATLAB and Simulink - Extras: MATLAB Tips & Tricks

figure(2)
bode(G)

% Set title, axes labels, and legend font size

set(findall(gcf,'Type','text'),'FontSize',11)

% Set data line width and color

set(findall(gcf,'Type','line'),'LineWidth',2,'Color','red')

% Set axes tick label font size, color, and line width
set(findall(gcf,'Type','axes'),'FontSize',11,'LineWidth',2,'XColor'

Please refer to the following pages to see all properties that can be modified
for figures and axes.

Published with MATLAB 7.14

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